John Kline

Accountability measures must be transparent, fair, and use multiple measures of evidence of growth.

Reauthorization is crucial to providing the nation's schools with relief from current law, which is both broken and lacking in flexibility states and local school districts need to support student learning and achievement.

The current federal law is the only thing left that stands in the way preventing us from helping the children of Denver.

Why should we have to go through all that effort, time and expense just to be able to act like an actual state?

Congress must empower states also to define and lead education reform efforts, while limiting the federal role to supporting authentic, comprehensive state and local reform efforts.

As long as the federal government spends tax dollars to fund public education there must be accountability for how those dollars are spent.

I commend Chairman Kline for offering a bill that acknowledges and respects that it is the state and local leaders who are driving education reform.

Thankfully, states have not waited for the federal government to act on ESEA and we have acted on our own to advance meaningful, state-driven levels of high accountability.

The recently introduced Student Success Act and Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act represent a strong step in the right direction.

The sincere, ongoing efforts of this committee to reauthorize ESEA and improve America's schools over the last 4 years are recognized across this nation.

Granting more freedom from the federal mandates of NCLB does not mean lowering the bar for any child.

The combined effect of these bills is to rely on state-designed accountability systems, state-designed academic standards and state-designed assessments.

We are proud to stand with the voices of opposition to these bills.

We urgently need Congress to reauthorize the ESEA law because for the past 10 years American schools have lived under a law that I have referred to as--it reminds me of the old Clint Eastwood movie, 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,'…

Again, I want to thank Chairman Kline for these proposals to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, what today we refer to as No Child Left Behind.

The stakes couldn't be higher.

For the sake of our children, we must continue working toward a consensus.

No one said rewriting a law as influential as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would be easy.

Unlike the administration's plan to offer temporary waivers that keep schools tied to a failing law, the proposals before us today take a step closer to enacting lasting education reforms that will raise the bar for student achievement and…

We acknowledged No Child Left Behind's shortcomings and convened a series of hearings in which dozens of witnesses described the challenges facing our nation's education system.

The provisions included in the Student Success Act and the Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act reflect the input we have received from parents, teachers, principals, superintendents, and others in the education community.

I just think it is really, really important that we keep faith and that we not change policy.

I think it is important that we keep faith, that we not change things around during the middle of a deployment.

This is an absolute assault against the National Labor Relations Board.

I think I want to go back to this little document I am holding in my hand right here, called a Constitution.